The Book Tower

Attempting to review Avatar is a somewhat pointless exercise. The film achieves what it sets out to do; namely becoming a piece of cinema that shows off its great expense whilst – mostly – also being an example of supreme entertainment. And, although I don’t particularly go along with the view that 3D is the future of film, it does push movie making further than its ever been pushed before.

My eleven year old daughter gave Avatar nine out of ten, subtracting a point for the overblown and tiresome battle scenes that occupy the last part of the film. For the same reason I will give it eight out of ten, deducting two points for each of the headache tablets I had to take afterwards. It’s at the end of the film that James Cameron lets himself down, reverting to type as the gung-ho director of The Terminator and Aliens. This violent streak is personified by the gun-toting (and cigar chomping, although I may have imagined that), muscly, military baddie Colonel Quaritch. Quaritch (played by Stephen Lang, who doesn’t unflex a muscle throughout the film) is the kind of kick-ass macho man who makes Rambo look rather shy and withdrawn. At one point he leads the attack on the aliens in the film with the words “we will fight terror – with terror”. I laughed, but nobody else did in our 300 strong audience. Which is worrying.

It’s a shame that aspects of Avatar are easy to mock because at times it is a great movie. The attention to detail of the alien planet Pandora is breathtaking. The sounds, the plantlife, the animals and monsters, the sheer size and depth of the gigantic forests. This is helped by the 3D element, although the films shows a painstaking care in imagining a very different world to our own. Into this is thrust Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a disabled marine who “becomes” one of the aliens, the Navi, for short periods by way of linking with a genetically bred Navi or “avatar”. This sets the film up rather cleverly, with Jake switching between the real world of familiar Cameron claustrophobic army space-bases (Sigourney Weaver also features to make you feel at home) and the almost dreamlike world of Pandora.

Waking when the Navi sleep, Jake records an increasingly bleak video diary where reality shrinks and the wonder of the alien world remains vivid to him. Sadly, Cameron doesn’t really explore the dream element as much as he could have done. Early in the film, Lang tells the new recruits that they’re “not in Kansas anymore”, although the reference to The Wizard of Oz is probably only a coincidence. Avatar also reminds of the lesser known The Fountain, which used the form of the tree for more symbolic purposes, but Cameron has a plot to get on with, where the human interest in Pandora is made very clear and the two species and worlds clash in a very ugly way. Although Avatar is generally a sci-fi Western (think Dances With Wolves in space), with the Navi the Indians facing genocide by Lang’s Cowboys, the Cowboys in this case are mining the Indians out of existence, with a valuable mineral that will save the dying Earth sitting right within snatching distance.

Like many a Western where the outsider is accepted by the Indians, Avatar features the typical series of initiation ceremonies. But this being alien territory, Cameron uses his imagination to great effect. Pandora is a nauseatingly vertiginous planet, with Jake racing across narrow and entwining sky-high branches to keep up with his new friends. At one point he has to tame a ferocious dragon-like creature (after first entering a particularly inaccessible region of floating mountains). The film takes an inevitable path, however, with Jake eventually leading the Navi into battle against the humans, led by Lang. Lang becomes the almost indestructible baddie typical of modern cinema, escaping all sorts of close shaves before he meets a particularly fitting and personal ending. And then there’s the obligatory robotic exo-skeleton he uses, reminding again of Aliens and now de rigeur in sci-fi (last seen to great effect in District 9).

I enjoyed it, but as I said above it made my head hurt. At getting on for three hours there’s too much 3D, CGI and branches, endless trees and branches. But Cameron’s anti-American message is interesting. Yes, the Yanks lose! Also interesting will be just how many of the film’s audience get the message.

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Mike Carey’s Felix Castor is currently dominating my bedside table. After completing The Devil You Know and Vicious Circle I am now making good progress with Dead Men’s Boots. To come are the fourth and fifth in the series, Thicker Than Water and The Naming of the Beasts.

Carey is an odd writer. At times his prose is extremely atmospheric and effective, but he often sinks into lazy and almost woeful writing. The fault is possibly the sheer weight of what he is attempting to achieve; very lengthy novels produced at regular intervals, where quality sometimes, but not always, suffers from the dictates of pace. Perhaps also Carey doesn’t have much faith in himself as a writer of quality. He is simply content to produce popular, or even pulp, fiction.

At over five hundred pages, Dead Men’s Boots does at times feel overlong. For a reader dedicated enough to reach the series as far as this third instalment it’s possible that Carey doesn’t need to fill in on as much as the background story as he does. Both Castor’s history and the stories of his associates are explained quite fully in both Vicious Circle and Dead Men’s Boots. Castor in an exorcist, discovering his talent at an early age when he had to rid himself of his dead sister’s ghost. He works in an alternative London, one intricately detailed to resemble the real capital but one also populated with a variety of horrors. Ghosts, zombies and loup gorous, demonic werewolf type creatures. He is joined by a series of recurring characters. Nicky is a zombie who has to keep his body chilled to avoid decomposition. He also enjoys a glass of wed wine but only to sniff, his digestive system long shut down. Juliet is a demon who preys on sexual lust, although since the close of The Devil you Know has become less of a threat and more of an ally to Castor. She’s also living in a single sex relationship with one of the supporting cast of Vicious Circle. Then there’s Rafi, a man possessed and incarcerated, whose plight haunts the background of the series.

Vicious Circle featured several interconnected stories, something Carey is revealing himself the master of. A missing ghost, a haunted church, both were extremely believable threads for a fantasy novel. In Dead Men’s Boots he appears more ambitious, and introduces several tales in parallel. The Rafi story continues, and Castor and his exorcist peers are tormented by a mysterious band of exorcist bashers. In the foreground however is Castor and Juliet’s investigation of a brutal murder. A man is convicted of the crime but was it really him? Or perhaps the ghost of a dead American criminal? Carey takes his characters beyond their usual setting with Castor and Juliet travelling to the US.

With five novels in three years, Mike Carey has created a successful franchise that, with a little tidying around the edges, will no doubt make the transfer to film or television that it’s crying out to do. However, in the Twilight soaked climate that also finds room for Being Human and True Blood it’s difficult to see how this would really be worthwhile. What Carey really needs to do is hone in his writing talent to produce a leaner piece of work that is content to stay on the page and not reveal itself as a wannabee screenplay. Somebody needs to give him a push, just a little one, for him to realise that he could be a quality author.

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I was very shocked to hear that Jack Pickard sadly passed away last weekend. Jack was a prolific blogger who wrote enthusiastically about a huge range of subjects. Web accessibility, Doctor Who, literature, politics, comedy, music, film; he was also a lover of the meme and it was a pleasure to take part in memes instigated by Jack over the years.

It was a honour to know that Jack read these pages regularly over the last four years I knew him. He often left comments and I’m grateful for that, and his passion for all things virtual meant regular contact on Twitter, Facebook and the accessible web standards forum Accessify. I even met him once, very briefly, but consider myself only an online associate so my thoughts go out to his friends and family at this tragic time.

I sincerely hope that The Pickards remains online for evermore. It will remain a valuable archive of great, witty writing. And the most fitting way of remembering him.

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